Now that I’ve got a job working for an email service provider I’ve started taking a bit more notice of different companies’ attempts at email marketing, and I have to admit to becoming slightly more sensitive about when they do it badly. Today I received yet another ridiculous failure that’s so bad I honestly can’t quite tell if it’s an actual phishing attempt or not.

It’s from PayPal. They sent out a message about “great summer savings”, coming from paypal@info.paypal.co.uk – but with a Reply-To: address as reply2@info.paypal.com. That wasn’t the first thing I found amusing, though – I’ve only just noticed that. The first thing was that I wanted to unsubscribe, and right at the bottom saw this:

“This email was sent to <insert user email address>, because your email preferences are set to receive the PayPal Periodical newsletter and Product Updates. Click here to Unsubscribe”

That’s funny enough on its own, but a few lines above that, they’ve added:

“How do I know this is not a Spoof email? Spoof or ‘phishing’ emails tend to have generic greetings such as “Dear PayPal member”. Emails from PayPal will always address you by your first and last name.

How ironic. Oh well, all I want to do is unsubscribe, so, after checking that the domains in the links aren’t some dodgy fake ones I click the “Unsubscribe” link, and what do I get?

Wow. Wow, just… wow. I mean, wow. How many fuckups can you get in one email? From one of the world’s biggest internet companies? Eesh.